From: "Janet Jackson" <[log in to unmask]>
> I'm not sure about "moue" though; that does make it hard to read,
> especially as today there is a word "moue" as well as "move".
> But - I seem to remember reading somewhere that "v"s were only
> slightly pronounced, hence "o'er", etc. Is that the reason for
> the "moue" spelling, or had the "v" symbol not been invented yet?
> Anyone know?
It was a strictly orthographic positional variant -- "u" and "v" (both
letters available in a standard printer's font) were identically pronounced,
but "v" tended to occur at the beginning of words -- "Vtter dark," for
example.
So u/v could stand for either a consonant or a vowel, depending on where in
the word they occurred.
The other killer is the long "s" ...
As John Donne said in line three of 'The Good Morrow', "Sucked on country
pleasures, childishly."
(I think the only modern editor who retained the long "s" was Herbert
Grierson in his 1912 edition of Donne, but even he, Highland Scottish
Calvanist that he was, compromised in later editions. Though he did retain
the original "u"/"v" printing.)
I'm with Jon in preferring Old Spelling, but even I would tend to regularise
(not modernise) the long "s", and the "i/"y" and "u"/"v" distinctions, as
they were purely orthographic.
Mind you, there's nothing quite so disastrous as to how the yogh (for which
there's no letter in a standard printing font) got transcribed as "z" in
Scots.
So "Menzies" is pronounced [mingus].
Deeply counter-intuitive, that.
:-(
Robin
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